"One of the most refreshingly lively, and also, perhaps, most critical things about Antti Latinen’s work is its humour, a feature that is not so much a deliberately concocted part of it, as something that is implicit within the form of the work itself. There is something absurd, for example, about producing a self portrait in which all that may be seen of the “sitter” is his arm protruding from a swamp. The decision to visit the swamp in the first place might be regarded as a somewhat silly, even imbecilic thing to do, it being in the nature of swamps to literally drag you down into oblivion. Yet making a self portrait is an act of preservation, so that appearing to possibly lose one’s life in the process of doing this carries its own comic – yet also somewhat melancholic – thread. Other instances of the emergence of an amusing angle within Laitinen’s practice come out of the very type of tasks he sets himself.

​Building his own micro island paradise (or rather, the visual stereotype of such a thing) is a case in point; the labour involved in this task being potentially immense, and the choice of sandbags as a key component of the structure’s physical construction adds to the silliness of the project. Will the sandbags hold back the water? The project is doomed to failure from the start, yet there is also something heroic, noble, and possibly a little selfish about manufacturing your own island. One is, however, also brought in mind of notions such as perseverance and self-sufficiency. In another version of the use of island imagery Laitinen turns what is normally a permanent place of escape or withdrawal into a vehicle, shifting the conditions we usually associate with islands (isolation, idiosyncrasy, withdrawal or even imprisonment) into their very opposite: transience, travel, placelessness, drift. So Laitinen’s comedic acts of commitment and technical inventiveness have a very humorous side to what may look at first sight as a good and seriously practical idea: want an island of your own but can’t afford to buy one? Well, just build one yourself!

Laitinen has remarked upon how one of the things he feels has most influenced his work was his watching, during childhood, of the British television series Monty Python’s Flying Circus, an early version of the bringing of a Dada-like “aesthetic” into popular culture. In utilising humour within his work, letting it emerge when and where it will, without fear of it somehow spoiling or tainting his practice, Laitinen reverses this move from high into low culture (insofar as these distinctions between genres still hold). Despite operating within the field of art Laitinen’s amusing escapades do much to disengage the traditionally serious from that considered light and merely entertaining. This artist makes humour work for him, recognising its potential as a device to expand the work, open it up to what might otherwise remain alienated or indifferent audiences and concomitantly novel ways of reading. It is not, in any case, that humour and meaningfulness cannot coincide. Although Laitinen’s background is that of photography, that curiously fluid category “performance art” is where he most directly involves himself today. Much of the Monty Python’s humour mirrored the kind of performance art activities that were developing around the same period wherein what were ostensibly very ordinary actions or events were turned, often by only a fairly small twist or alteration, into far-reaching parodies of domestic or quotidian forms of life.

​In Laitinen’s work, and in relation to his being from a later generation of artists than those involved in performance in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, it is performance art itself which is alluded to. Whereas an audience for a work by Stuart Brisley or Joseph Beuys would have tried, twenty or thirty years ago, to participate in the work through a studied, thoroughly serious engagement with the work unfolding before them, today things are much more knowing and relaxed. This “knowingness” is a condition of culture now, and it is in a sense a starting point for Laitinen, a given structure of perception which repositions once-obscure activities such as those to be found within earlier performance art, so that they become the first order referential content of a sophisticated, second order practice of art. This is to suggest that the metalinguistic components of Laitinen’s practice are both necessary and productive. Humour and irony are not strange companions, but part of the same condition of reflexivity or introspection in and through which contemporary culture exists." - PETER SUCHIN

It's My island was part of Antti Laitinen exhibition at A Foundations in The Liverpool Biennale.